


In Sickness

by Roga



Category: CHARLES K. J. - Works, Society of Gentlemen - K. J. Charles
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Illness, Injury (mild), M/M, but seriously a LOT of fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-15
Updated: 2020-12-15
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:28:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28136946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Roga/pseuds/Roga
Summary: Silas learns it's okay to be taken care of sometimes.(or: five times Silas or David find themselves sick or injured.)
Relationships: David Cyprian/Richard Vane, Dominic Frey/Silas Mason
Comments: 23
Kudos: 43
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	In Sickness

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Arsenic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arsenic/gifts).



> For Arsenic, who requested Silas or David to be in a position where they need a little care, and for them to get it.

**1.**

It did not escape Silas’s attention that something was on Dom’s mind. 

They were lying in Dominic’s bed together at Arrandene, Silas leaning back against the rosewood bed frame. The house was well-occupied, and for appearance’s sake, at some point during the night Silas would extricate himself – with great difficulty, one admitted, at this point in the night – from Dominic’s room and bed and warm, satisfied body, and go down to his own quarters, but Silas did not think the impending separation was what had placed the small furrow between his Tory’s brows.

He shifted his shoulder, nudging Dominic without dislodging him from his position: sprawled against Silas’s side, head resting on Silas’s bare chest, fingers trailing gently against Silas’s left arm.

“Anything you want to share?” he asked. Dominic had seemed fine tonight – tired from work, slightly ragged around the eyes, the way he got on weeks when Silas wagered he didn’t leave the office for longer than it took to sleep and eat, but nothing more unusual than that; significantly more relaxed, it should be said, after their activities.

Dominic sighed, breath ghosting over Silas’s chest. He took Silas’s hand more carefully than was needed. Silas let him; his arm had stopped hurting almost entirely the day before last, nothing but a lingering ache in his wrist, and the bruises that only hurt when pressed. He knew Dominic wouldn’t press.

“I wish you’d told me,” Dominic said. 

Silas frowned. “Told you what?”

“About this,” Dominic said, pressing a kiss to Silas’s fingers. 

Silas snorted. “It was nothing,” he said. It had been, in fact, mildly embarrassing. Silas had been rearranging some books in the library – Lord Richard had a surprising collection of republican poets, and Silas was on a mission to liberate them all from the dark corners and top shelves they’d been relegated to. In this case, he’d been reaching for a top shelf Milton when one of the Vane hounds, of all things, had bounded into the room, startling him enough that – well, there was no way around it. Silas had fallen off the ladder, blocking his fall with his left hand, his full body weight landing on it at just the wrong angle.

Sure, it had hurt like the devil at the moment, and the bruise had spread from wrist to elbow, a rainbow of colors decorating his arm. But Silas had received worse blows before; not even enough to see a doctor, this one, or at least that’s what he’d told David, when he’d tried to coerce Silas into it. A sprained wrist was a pain in the arse, but Silas was practically a man of leisure now; not like he needed his arm to operate an iron press, to heft around boxes of inventory. He’d continued to do his work, everything seemed to heal properly, and the pain eventually subsided. 

“It was really nothing to make a fuss about,” Silas assured him. 

“Maybe I wanted to make a fuss,” Dominic pointed out.

“I promise you, I’m all right.” Silas flexed his fingers. “Might have gone a little easy on you with this hand tonight. Won’t happen again.”

Dominic sighed again. “That is the least of my concerns, Silas. But all right.” He squeezed Silas’s hand gently, then let go. “Just stay here a little bit longer, tonight.”

“Aye, Tory. Wasn’t planning on anything else.”

**2.**

Silas let David lead him to the back room at Quex’s, too tired to argue. Which, he knew, said something.

“It’s not out of the realm of possibility that your Mr. Frey,” David said, “is going to murder me. Sit,” he said firmly, pushing Silas down onto a chair.

“I’m fine,” Silas said.

“You look like you’ve gone ten rounds with a prizefighter.”

“Two rounds at most,” Silas said. “It wasn’t that bad.”

David snorted. “Tell that to my livery.” Silas glanced at David’s dark green Vane livery, which looked. Well. Slightly bled upon.

“Sorry for that,” he said sheepishly. “Matches your hair, at least. Maybe his Lordship will like it.”

“You’re hilarious,” David said dryly, and put a cold, wet scrap of cloth against Silas’s eye.

Silas flinched. “Give me that,” he said, and took the cloth from David’s hand.

David rolled his eyes. “Of course you have to do it yourself. Go on, then.” David dragged a stool to Silas’s side, placed a basin of water on it, and a small mirror. “Help yourself.”

Damn, but his head hurt. It had been a while since Silas had been in a fight. 

David gave him a long look, as Silas kept the scrunched-up cloth tight against his swollen eye, struggling with the reflex to wince. “I know the last two weeks have been rather dragging on your nerves, Mason, this being the season and all, gentry all about, but. Did you really have to punch Alton in the nose?”

“The bastard deserved it,” Silas growled. He’d punched right back, too. Probably had to learn early on. Rupert Alton had one of the most punchable faces Silas had met in his life.

“Well, of course he deserved it,” David said. “He’s an intolerable prick. But you’re a ref—”

“—reformed character, yes, yes,” Silas said. 

“ _Yes_ ,” said David. “And as such, you really should not be having altercations with Lord Fairfax’s – nor any other lords’, to make that very clear – bookman.”

“Don’t know how anyone at Fairfax’s puts up with him.”

“They barely do.”

“Always got to say something dickish about anything popular because he thinks it’s _common_.”

“Very disagreeable.”

“He called Blake overrated,” Silas grumbled.

“Believe me, I heard,” David said.

“Why’d you think Dom would be mad at you, anyway?” Silas frowned. He dipped the cloth in the water basin, rinsed it, and put it back against his eye. “’M not your responsibility.”

A smile played on David’s lips. “I thought you’d learned by now. Everything is my responsibility.” David shook his head. “But that’s not it.” He produced another strip of cloth from somewhere, wetted it, and dabbed at the stains on his waistcoat. “It is mostly that Mr. Frey will not be pleased that you were injured on my watch, and I did not call for him.”

“Why on earth would Dominic Frey need to be pulled from a _ton_ soiree to be informed of a brawl between two bookmen?”

“Indeed Dominic Frey should not.” David raised an eyebrow. “Your Dom, however…”

“Oh, bullocks.” Silas meant to shake his head, remembering at the last minute it would be a bad idea. “This is nothing.”

“So you said.”

“Good. We can leave it at that.”

Silas did not quite understand the long look David directed at him, but then, Silas was still a little – all right, mostly – drunk, and so he took his own advice, and left it at that.

**3.**

It was the kind of day that was so unfairly comfortable with simple luxuries, that Silas almost wanted to run away.

He didn’t, of course, though he did resolve to donate a larger portion of his wages to charity this month, and see if he could push David to do the same with some of Lord Richard’s funds as well. It was all too good to be true, sometimes, and with children still living in the streets Silas grew up on, there were days when so much – happiness, he could face the facts and call it that – was a little too much to bear.

It was a lazy winter afternoon. Dominic was visiting Arrandene for Christmas, but no other guests were due to arrive till next week, and Lord Richard had let most of the servants off for the holiday, leaving only a skeletal staff to keep the household running.

It had snowed all night and earlier today, and outside, the rolling hills were blanketed in the kind of pristine white fairytales were made of. A roaring fire was crackling in the hearth, and the three of them – Silas, Dominic, and Lord Richard – were spending the afternoon in the library, Lord Richard in a high-backed chair, Dominic and Silas sharing a sofa. Lord Richard was being surprisingly not terrible today, and Dominic, yesterday’s newspaper in his lap and feet tucked rather shockingly under Silas’s thigh, looked painfully at ease.

Dominic and Richard were carrying most of the conversation – no business and no politics, and not even too much gossip, for once. They were reminiscing in a low voice, old stories from school and from Cirencester House. A glimpse into a private history Silas was not privy to; one, he knew, was rarely shared at all. 

There was a knock on the door. Lord Richard gave Dominic a moment to arrange himself, then said, voice carrying easily through the heavy doors, “Come in.”

“My lord,” said Hughes, the footman. “It’s Mr. Cyprian. He’s returned from the city.”

Lord Richard frowned. “He wasn’t supposed to return until tomorrow.”

“No, sir,” said Hughes, a nervous look in his eyes. “It seems there was a problem with the carriage, sir. Mr. Cyprian left it in London to be repaired, only it wouldn’t be fixed for two weeks from now. But Lady Jenkinson was sending a coach to St Albans, and offered Mr. Cyprian to join until Arrandene, only… the snow, sir.”

Lord Richard rose from his seat, face pale. “The pass.”

“Yes, sir,” Hughes said, and Silas realized what Lord Richard must have. The snowfall last night would have blocked off the road entirely to coaches, let alone ones detouring around. David would have had to either continue to St Albans, or—

“Don’t tell me he walked,” Lord Richard said.

Hughes hesitated, clearly unsure what to do in the face of direct orders.

“Damn it,” Lord Richard growled. Silas started to rise, but Lord Richard said, “No, stay. This is the warmest fire in the house. You, come,” he told Hughes, and the two left the room, Lord Richard barking orders about blankets and hot water.

The door closed behind them. “Damn, Foxy,” Silas found himself wondering. “That would have to be – a two hour walk, in the storm?”

“Three,” Dominic said, sounding worried. He clasped Silas’s hand. Silas squeezed back.

The door burst open a few minutes later, Lee and Carroll dragging in a basin of steaming water, a pile of blankets, and a tray of hot tea, coffee, and an assortment of cakes, biscuits, fruits and chocolate – one that Carroll no doubt just had lying around, knowing her.

Lord Richard was next to enter, with Hughes right behind him, one arm supporting David, who looked terrible.

Together, they helped David into a large chair by the fire; one fit for Lord Richard’s frame, that made David look even smaller, huddled and shivering as he was. 

“Thank you, Hughes,” Lord Richard said. “You may leave now.”

The three of them left, closing the door behind them, leaving Dominic, Silas, Lord Richard, and David alone in the room. 

“David,” Lord Richard said, and sank to his knees in front of David’s chair.

Silas’s breath caught in his throat.

David regularly pale skin was even paler, his lips practically blue, and he seemed to be shaking all over. But he lifted a hand to Lord Richard’s cheek, and said, in a voice steadier than his hand, “I’m all right.”

Lord Richard closed his eyes, turning his face into to David’s palm. He pressed David’s palm to his cheek, almost reverently, and said, “All right. Come here.”

It wasn’t until Lord Richard arranged David under a satisfactory number of blankets, then realized he would be sitting too far away, then pulled David into another sofa that they could share, re-heaped him with blankets, and, to top it off, found some bright red wool cap from Lord knew where and pulled it over David’s bright red hair, that he seemed able to relax.

Well, relax a _little_.

The conversation picked up again. Silas didn’t contribute much, not wanting to unsettle the peace in the room, and not really trusting himself not to say something that might upset Lord Richard, which, for once, he didn’t want to do. Not with David still looking as fragile as he was. David, meanwhile, did look a fraction better; he had stopped shivering, and his cheeks were flushed with dark patches of rose. Lord Richard kept feeding him small pieces of chocolate, and stroking his arms and head as David lay curled around him like a tired ginger cat, warming by the fire.

“That was quite a day,” Silas said later that evening, after they retired to Dominic’s room.

“Hmm, yes,” Dominic said. There was something wistful in his face that Silas couldn’t quite decipher.

“A little strange, even,” Silas confessed, settling in bed. “Seeing…”

Dominic smiled. “Not used to seeing Richard so affectionate?”

Silas blinked at the sharp reminder of Dominic knowing how affectionate Lord Richard could be, in private. There was a hint of wickedness in Dom’s smile, Silas could see now.

“Seems like Cyprian knows how to take it,” Dominic added.

“Oh?” Silas asked, heart skipping a beat in that way it sometimes did when Dom gave him that look. He shifted back in the bed, clearing up space. “What about you? Want to show me how much you can take?”

Dominic grinned.

**4.**

There was a deep, throbbing ache behind Silas’s eye. Behind, fucking hell, both eyes. Silas felt like he’d been hit with a… what was the word. He couldn’t think, with his head pounding like this. Big stick with iron. Sledgehammer.

Someone was speaking above him. Reading something. Silas couldn’t really make out the words, but the voice was soothing, and Silas focused on the sounds until they lulled him back to sleep.

It was his own coughing that woke him up. 

“It’s all right, you’re all right,” he heard from nearby. A glass of water was thrust into his hand, and Silas alternated between gulping water and coughing, until he could breathe long enough without his chest convulsing. 

“Jesus,” he finally managed. He didn’t dare take a deep breath for risk of another coughing fit.

“Just me,” came the voice beside him. It was David.

“What are you doing here?” 

“What do you think, Mason?” David asked wearily.

Silas was having a little trouble focusing. “Shouldn’t you be off… assisting his lordship?”

“I’m right where his lordship needs me to be, I promise you that.”

“But—”

Silas trailed off. He noticed, suddenly, that he was very, very hot.

David placed an cold compress against Silas’s forehead. “You look like death warmed over,” David said.

“I feel like death,” Silas said. 

David flashed him a foxy grin. “Ah, he admits it. That’s good progress. Go to sleep.”

Silas felt his eyes closing, as if they wanted to obey the command, and he was just along for the ride. _Were you reading to me earlier?_ he wanted to ask, and wasn’t sure if he’d managed to, aloud.

He thought he heard David say no, but that’s as far as he got before the world turned to black.

He dreamt about a dark lord, who had kidnapped a buxom maiden and strapping lad and whisked them off to a life of piracy on the big seas. When he woke up again, he heard that same voice from before:

“ _Lord Darkdown swung down from the main sail, and landed on the deck in front of Alfonso, whose ripped shirt was_ —good heavens— _clinging to his chest by its last threads, gleaming in the last rays of sunset. Lord Darkdown brandished his whip_ —David, you _will pay_ for this— _and readied himself to make the first strike_ —oh, thank god you’re awake.”

Silas blinked his eyes open. He closed them, and tried again, but the man sitting by his bedside, reading from the latest novel by A Lady that Silas had just ordered last month, was still Lord Richard Vane.

For a moment, he wondered if he’d somehow switched bodies with David Cyprian, because that seemed to make more sense than what was going on.

Lord Richard seemed happy enough to take a break from the novel to explain it. “Your fever broke last night,” he said. “Dr. Martelo had written that once the fever has broken, it would be safe for Dom to come to Arrandene. He’s not been ill this winter, and his lungs have always been slightly – well. Cyprian and I were both sick earlier this winter, you remember.”

Silas remembered. Lord Richard’s large body seemed to brush off illnesses with nary a sneeze; David had taken a little longer to recover, but was back to business within a few weeks. Silas could breathe now, but his entire body ached, down to the bone. He didn’t even want to imagine Dom feeling like this. Not, he corrected, if he himself didn’t put the feeling there.

His Tory. For a moment Silas wished he were here; that Silas could just lay his head on Dominic’s lap, and let Dominic run his fingers through Silas’s hair until he fell asleep again. But there was no real reason for Dom to come down to Arrandene, let alone if it might put him at risk in any way.

It seemed Lord Richard had called for David while Silas wasn’t paying attention, because suddenly David was there, and now there were two of them at Silas’s sickbed, and that was two more people than Silas felt was strictly necessary.

Perhaps sensing Silas’s uneasiness, Lord Richard decided it was his cue to leave. He smacked the pirate novel against David’s chest. “Here, you take this. Please don’t return it.” He unfolded himself from his seat, stretching for a moment, as if he’d been sitting for a long time. “I’ll see that the staff are prepared for Dom’s arrival.”

“Wait,” Silas said. “Dom’s coming? You sent for him?” 

Lord Richard blinked. “Well, of course I sent for Dom, are you mad?”

“Why would he need to come?”

Lord Richard stared, then said to Cyprian: “You deal with this.”

David shook his head ruefully, putting – very clearly purely in an effort to rile Silas up – his head in his hands.

“What the hell?” Silas said.

“For heaven’s sake, Mason.” David looked up, lips quirking. “Yes, the world’s a cruel place, and it’s good for a man to know how to stand and survive on his own two feet, and you can probably withstand all of life’s hardships, big and small, if you need to, but by god, you don’t _have_ to.”

David Cyprian, Silas was aware, always took far too much satisfaction in rendering Silas speechless.

“You were asleep, burning with fever, for almost a week.” David ran a hand through his red hair. “For a week, we received two letters a day. ‘Wash his clothes’. ‘Put him by the east window.’ ‘Read him this’. ‘Cook him that.’ Mr. Frey sent us a recipe for soup, Silas.”

This was all… disturbing information. “I didn’t know Dom even knew what went into a soup. Didn’t think he’d picked up a spoon in his life.” Silas loved Dom, but he shuddered to think of what might happen to him if he ate something someone in _society_ cooked up.

“Point is, Silas,” David said, tapping on the wool-covered mattress for emphasis. “Mr. Frey wants to take care of you when you’re hurting. _Fucking let him._ ”

It was later that night – much, much later, after Dominic had arrived, after Dominic had taken a shaky look at Silas and gripped him like he never wanted to let him go, after Dominic had fed him soup and port and a ghastly powder prescribed by Dr. Martelo and Silas had survived to tell the tale – after all of those, Silas found himself lying in bed in the dark, head pillowed on Dominic’s lap. Dominic was leaning back against a small mountain of feather cushions, and he was cradling Silas’s head so, so gently, his thumbs tracing delicate circles on Silas’s temples.

His muscles still ached, and he could feel the stiffness in his limbs, his lungs, but as Dom continued, the tips of his fingers scratching lightly through Silas’s hair, Silas could begin to feel a bone-deep tranquility, rolling over him from scalp to toes. 

“Hush, my brute.” Dom whispered. “Stop thinking.”

Silas slept.

**5.**

“Ow!”

Silas dropped the sheaf of papers he was holding on the large marble-topped desk in the Vane library, shaking his hand. Dominic’s eyes immediately flew up to him. “What’s wrong?

Silas growled. “Fucking papercut.”

Dominic bit his lip, clearly trying to hide a smile. “The nemesis of the bookman and the taxman both,” he said solemnly. “We have a common enemy after all.”

Dominic rose from his perch on the newest addition to the library – a green chaise-longue, gigantic like all of the furniture David somehow procured for the house – and came up to Silas. “Does it hurt?” he asked.

“N—” Silas began automatically, and cut himself off. He felt the sharp sting in his index finger. “A bit,” he relented, lifting the finger up to show Dominic with a shrug.

Dominic grasped his hand lightly, placed a fleeting kiss against the cut, and squeezed it for a brief second. He produced a small handkerchief from his pocket – monogrammed, Silas noted – and wrapped it around Silas’s finger, trying it up with another kiss.

He didn’t let go of Silas’s hand. “Better?” he asked.

Something fluttered tenderly in Silas’s chest.

“Yes,” he said.

Dom looked up at Silas through dark lashes, and moved his mouth to Silas’s middle finger, lapping it with his tongue and ending with a sucking motion. 

“How about this one?” he asked.

Silas felt a shiver run through him. “Never hurt,” he pointed out.

“Hmm,” Dom said, and moved to the next finger, sucking the tip without breaking eye contact for a moment. “And that one?”

“Nor that,” Silas said evenly.

“Well,” Dom said, and Silas felt his blood rush with the beginning of Dom’s smirk. “I’m sure I can kiss it better anyway.”

**Author's Note:**

> Happy yuletide! <3


End file.
